“The little green men”

Some of Batman’s lunatic villain adversaries, fit only too well for a part, in this text. (For the record, and if anyone cares to know, I prefer the “Batman Animated” Series version)
So, if Poison Ivy would jump out from the comics into real life, she would get elected as President in no-time… and from there on she would make sure to establish herself further more, on a global scale. Poison Ivy is “green” to the extreme… just as the extremist environmentalists, which are gaining ground and control by the minute…

You’ve got the wrong coloooor…
Once we were being told that Martians are green! Nowadays everybody wants to be Mart… green I mean…
It has become a very profitable business and the politically right thing in every respect, to state that you are green. Political parties, oil companies, fashion designers, environmental organizations, supermarkets, my aunt Marie… When you’re green you’re clean…    
But unfortunately I have two shocking news to break through:

1. This morning when I woke up, like the many mornings before, I saw no… clean from all this green.
2. Green is the wrong color in representing the environment, and I will prove it right here.

To begin with, and put as simply as possible, we live on a blue planet! Yes, the one with the blue oceans (covering most of its surface) the blue seas and, if it has occurred to you, the vast blue sky above us. We actually drift in space as a blue dot.
It is a scientific proven fact that the majority of the earth’s oxygen is produced by the (blue) oceans. In comparison, only a small part of the earth’s oxygen comes from the green. But as with many great things in life, the misconception on this… prevailed, and green became the color of a flag on a “movement” that doesn’t exist… “Taking out the trash” and “cleaning up” is no movement. It is the shameful result of where we have come to, and what is left for us to do, due to our total absent mind-ness.
 
So, my green friends, I herewith announce you that you’re into the wrong color. Now don’t turn “blue” on me (in any way), colors have little to do with the environment anyway. Just remember that like in colors, we began to use the term environment, not like the term originally intended to (describing where we are in). Mostly, when you hear it, the word describes something, but the sound in the ears rings as a kind of recognition of what we have destroyed…

The realistic approach to the matter clearly shows that it is not the environment we do care about or the birds and the trees… it is us we worry about, who will suffocate in it, if we continue like this.

Global warming by… Mr. Freeze
The environment has far too many of those who care to “protect” it “save” it, and far too few of those who will just leave it alone. 
We are not only into the “wrong color” we are into the wrong direction as well. The environmental issue that produces the biggest noise today has to do with climate change. We are “overheating” our planet, it’s been said, and as a result, entire strategies of the economy are “heading” towards “investments” that will “heal” this situation. While this is going on, faint voices of scientists are silenced by the hysteric green screaming. Faint voices that are telling us it is the Sun’s behavior that is responsible for the overheating. This overheating is a natural phenomenon and an indication of a change that will come soon. But it will come from a totally different direction than expected. After a rapid decline of heating it will shift us into the next… ice age! (21st Century Science & Technology Gregory Murphy και Laurence Hecht)

But the investments are made, the media are all over this, the public is persuaded and the “beats” are on… who has the spine to “call it off” now?!

Rightly one might say: “…but you’re a Martial Artist… environment is far from your field of experience or science…”
Well… to put is as simply as I can, weren’t you not persuaded until this morning that blue is green?

Make no mistake, this is no “paradise”
It is easy for a person, who has not even spend a night in a tent, to grow a love for nature as he is imaging it from his flat apartment and not as the great wide open really is. And spending a day or so running around in the wild, fully equipped with outdoor gadgets and gear, doesn’t count either as a real contact with nature…
It is easy for modern man to grow a false love for the “environment”. He can easily idealize it, put it in a jar and then keep it in his mind. It is also so much “in” these days.        

Nature is not a… garden with flowers, actually it never was…

What is described below are conditions that have occurred in the earth’s past and for sure will happen again, so take your pick. The earth will get rid of us in the following ways.

1. Asteroid “visit” (look under extinction of dinosaurs and ask any astronomer to which part of the galaxy we are running into, as we speak. Of course it will “take time” to get there, but the course is laid*)
2. Interactive volcanic activity (of very great scale)
3. Shift of the earth’s axis (it’s a normal routine for Earth)
4. Ice age, because it’s time for one, or two…
5. Collapse of earth’s atmosphere because the Sun “sneezed” (gesundheit!)
6. Hostile meat-eating aliens (okay, that’s a joke)
7. Evolution of a new species that we stand in its way (that’s no joke!)
8. Use your imagination…

I will exclude our own self-destruction that would occur out of stupidity or incompetence, because I still need… a reason to live and look into our future. 

But even without the above list, earth is no paradise for man. In order for him to live here you’ll have to exclude both poles, a great number of deserts and wastelands, all high altitude mountains and that’s only the beginning, since we cannot live on the oceans or seas or lakes or rivers… Early humankind has struggled for ages in order to make sure it could survive here… The Earth is our place of birth, but sooner or later (no matter how good we take care of it) it will claim our species… 

The Earth is the egg from which we hatched, and our true destiny is not to sit on that egg, but to spread our wings and fly…
I have expressed it before and will do so again, personally I already feel marooned here… 
*BBC, Science Series, SPACE, with Sam Neil.

Humans are the earth’s epitome
Extremist environmentalists (or shall I say the little green men?) tend to build an icon of humans that cultivates guilt. And they are giving a hard try to pass this icon further on, to children, institutions of education, magazines and so on and so forth… Of course, for a “good reason” anything can be said in order to save the earth.
Yes, we do pollute, and yes we do much more than this that needs to be dealt with, but we are no way the… scum of the earth. In fact it took the earth’s efforts of countless millennia in order to create its top… model. Us! We didn’t pop up out of thin air and we didn’t have the idea of creating us…

The greatest judge is ourselves… A man could stand alone and apart, even if the entire mankind would turn against him. But he could easily destroy himself (literally or in other ways) if you successfully push his guilt button…
We should correct our mistakes, whatever they may be, but nothing should take away our pride in being humans in the process. A man with inferior self-respect is a ticking bomb. He can be easily manipulated into far more dangerous actions than throwing around his trash…

Batman is training
Painting roofs white!  …for ecological reasons, has been proposed just a few weeks back. This is practically an… ancient idea, that was mindlessly abandoned and will now cost nothing to politicians to drag back from the past. So, is this all they came up with, now, in 2009?
Just click under Greek islands pictures, and you will see this “new idea” in thousands of houses that are scattered across the Aegean Sea… But furthermore, these houses are not only totally white, but have thick walls with little windows, in order to be warm in the winter and cool in the summer… These houses are not needlessly oversized, but are ergonomically built according to human measurement... and nevertheless with a breathtaking view of endless miles into the Sea, that will elevate the soul far above the, so much admired today, concept of a big fat “property”. Houses, which will collect the winter rains, from their tiny flat roofs and right into self-made wells, for household use… Houses that… oh somebody stop me…
“To paint the roofs white” is only a fraction of what some civilizations have been doing for (I don’t dare to look) how long…    

We don’t need little green men and we don’t need guilty-free white roofs.
We need education, training and attitude… But beware! Not of the kind that measures man by a piece of paper. Not the kind that measures life itself like an “investment”. And not the kind, that treats nature as a helpless pet.
One might say “the Aikido promoter is about to do his punch line”. Yes he is, but just think for a moment. Education, training and attitude, can be cultivated in many Arts, outside mine, if you wish.

A solution, a proposal to the environmental problem, is like all other problems. And they are many of them, like wars, drugs, ethical decline… We can be absorbed at solving problems, but in how many directions at the same time?  At the end of the day you will have solved some, and some not.

Do you wanna “invest” in solving problems? Well do so into the right direction. In the only direction that will refrain from causing as many problems in the first place and to such an extreme…   
Invest in man himself, in order to see a difference!

Unbelievable Japanese tradition
There were no roads in feudal Japan… and though the use of wheels was known, it was not used for transportation. The idea was that building roads would destroy the land. So, they used natural created paths, on which they traveled in a single line manner, either on horse or on foot. Of course they knew all about roads from info that would come into the islands from other countries… but still they resisted to them for centuries…
And what are we doing? We can’t even get our colors in line. White roofs for houses and “green horses” for cars…

Time well spent
In many ways I am an extremist too, I guess. When I use the term “everyday practice” my senior students start to grin… They are the only ones who actually know what I mean by that… They know it only too well!
But still non practitioners come with the query: And Sundays too? and at Christmas? and at New Years Eve? …and some continue their grinning.
If I see my life so far, if I see myself as a… polluter of this earth, then environmentalists owe me something. Don’t they have an award? In green of course! Well I won it. Because me plus a number of my students have spent most of our lives, day in day out, practicing on a few square meters of straw tatami. We are fulfilled environmentalists…
I even use dim light at evening lessons (long before lamps became… a crime) regardless if some students protest. Most attacks happen with dim light, I keep telling them…
The more one practices, and spends time for his Dojo, the more one stays off, from negative acts, even later on (…including polluting). One can speak only for himself, but can you realize how many more of “us” are out there? How many that quietly practice, day in day out, as a way of life?!   
So, where have you been spending your time little green man?
Class dismissed!
 
June 14, 2009